Myers’ PSYCHOLOGY (7th Ed)

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Myers PSYCHOLOGY (7th Ed)

• Chapter 4
• The Developing Person
• James A. McCubbin, PhD
• Clemson University
• Worth Publishers

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Fact vs. Falsehood

• 1. If a mother drinks heavily, her baby may be
  mentally retarded.
• 2. Newborns see only a blur of meaningless light
  and dark shades.
• 3. Before age 2, infants cannot think.
• 4. Infants initially develop close attachment to
  their mothers merely because they provide
  nourishment.
• 5. Most abusive parents were themselves battered
  or neglected as children.
• 6. Nine of ten high-school seniors agree with
  the statement, On the whole, Im satisfied with
  myself.
• 7. Menopause creates significant psychological
  problems for women.
• 8. Most mothers are depressed for a time after
  their children grow up, leave home, and marry.
• 9. People in their twenties and thirties report
  greater life satisfaction than those in their
  sixties and seventies.
• 10. The first two years of life provide a good
  basis for predicting a persons eventual
  personality traits.

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Prenatal Development and the Newborn

• Developmental Psychology
• a branch of psychology that studies physical,
  cognitive and social change throughout the life
  span

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Prenatal Development and the Newborn
Life is sexually transmitted
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Prenatal Development and the Newborn

• Zygote
• the fertilized egg
• enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division
• develops into an embryo
• Embryo
• the developing human organism from 2 weeks
  through 2nd month
• Fetus
• the developing human organism from 9 weeks after
  conception to birth

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Prenatal Development and the Newborn

• 40 days 45 days 2 months 4 months

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Prenatal Development and the Newborn

• Teratogens
• agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can
  reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal
  development and cause harm
• Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
• physical and cognitive abnormalities in children
  caused by a pregnant womans heavy drinking
• symptoms include misproportioned head

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The Newborn

• Grasping Reflex
• Firmly grabbing anything placed in the palm
• Rooting Reflex
• to open mouth, and search for nipple when touched
  on the cheek
• Preferences
• human voices and faces
• facelike images--gt
• smell and sound of mother
  preferred

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The Newborn

• Habituation
• decreasing responsiveness with repeated
  stimulation (they get used to it)

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The Newborn
Having habituated to the old stimulus, newborns
preferred gazing at a new one
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Infancy and Childhood Physical Development

• Maturation
• growth processes that enable orderly changes in
  behavior
• relatively uninfluenced by experience

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Infancy and Childhood Physical Development

• Babies only 3 months old can learn that kicking
  moves a mobile--and can retain that learning for
  a month (Rovee-Collier, 1989, 1997).

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development

• Schema
• a concept or framework that organizes and
  interprets information (our idea of how the world
  is)
• Assimilation
• interpreting ones new experience in terms of
  ones existing schemas (adding info to our world
  view)

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development

• Accommodation
• adapting ones current understandings (schemas)
  to incorporate new information (changing our
  world view due to new info)
• Cognition
• All the mental activities associated with
  thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

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Piagets Stages of Cognitive Development
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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development

• Object Permanence
• the awareness that things continue to exist even
  when not perceived

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development

• Baby Mathematics
• Shown a numerically impossible outcome, infants
  stare longer (Wynn, 1992)

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development

• Conservation
• the principle that properties such as mass,
  volume, and number remain the same despite
  changes in the forms of objects

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development

• Egocentrism
• the inability of the preoperational child to take
  anothers point of view (no sense of empathy or
  personal space Its all about Me
• Theory of Mind
• peoples ideas about their own and others mental
  states
• Autism
• a disorder that appears in childhood
• Marked by deficiencies in communication, social
  interaction and understanding of others states
  of mind

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Psychosexual stages Freud

• Oral focus on the mouth, choking hazard stage
• Anal focus on elimination, potty training stage
• Phallic discovery of boy/girl
  parts as special

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Freuds stages continued
Latency cootie stage Genital post-puberty
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Social Development

• Stranger Anxiety
• fear of strangers that infants commonly display
• beginning by about 8 months of age
• Attachment
• an emotional tie with another person
• shown in young children by their seeking
  closeness to the caregiver and displaying
  distress on separation

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Social Development

• Harlows Surrogate Mother Experiments
• Monkeys preferred contact with the comfortable
  cloth mother, even while feeding from the
  nourishing wire mother
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vfLrBrk9DXVk

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Social Development

• Critical Period
• an optimal period shortly after birth when an
  organisms exposure to certain stimuli or
  experiences produces proper development (the
  window of opportunity to learn new things)
• Imprinting
• the process by which certain animals form
  attachments during a critical period very early
  in life

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Social Development

• Groups of infants left by their mothers in a
  unfamiliar room (from Kagan, 1976).

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Social Development

• Basic Trust (Erik Erikson)
• a sense that the world is predictable and
  trustworthy
• said to be formed during infancy by appropriate
  experiences with responsive caregivers
• Self-Concept
• a sense of ones identity and personal worth

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Social Development Child-Rearing Practices

• Authoritarian
• parents impose rules and expect obedience
• Dont interrupt. Why? Because I said so.
• Permissive
• submit to childrens desires, make few demands,
  use little punishment
• Authoritative
• both demanding and responsive
• set rules, but explain reasons and encourage open
  discussion

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Social Development Child-Rearing Practices